Scientists Chirp Excitedly for LIGO, Gravitational Waves and Einstein

How do you celebrate a major discovery in physics and astronomy that could change the shape of scientific inquiry for the next century? Many scientists active on social media did it by chirping.

Evidence of gravitational waves was announced on Thursday by physicists associated with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory project. The experiment’s two L-shaped antennas, in Louisiana and Washington state, detected a signal in September that resulted from a collision of two black holes more than a billion light-years from our spot in the universe. That reading could go a long way toward confirming a part of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

The disturbance that the antennas picked up was converted by LIGO researchers into sound waves, producing a chirping sound that is something like an interstellar ring tone that can be heard by anyone or anything in the universe listening for it.

Rumors of the discovery swirled before the announcement, and while they waited to hear it, scientists took to Twitter, YouTube and other digital platforms to make their own chirps.

The trend appears to have been kicked off by Katherine J. Mack, an astrophysicist in Australia. She wrote on Twitter that she was practicing her “gravitational wave binary inspiral chirp. For science,” and shared a YouTube video:

Like a siege of herons or a bevy of larks, other physicists and science aficionados heeded her hashtag of #ChirpForLIGO and recorded their own sounds, many of which were captured in this YouTube roundup:

And as the LIGO announcement neared, a group of scientists at Monash University recorded their chirps as a group, with help from some libations:

But the people running the Albert Einstein Twitter account suggested that the eminent physicist would have found his own audible way to celebrate if he were with us today: